Shadowing a user desktop is a common practice for administrators helping to resolve desktop-related issues. For example, an administrator may remotely view and/or control the state of the user's desktop on the administrator's device concurrently with the user (while the user views the user's desktop on a separate device) in order to provide assistance. In physical and virtual desktop environments, software installed upon the user's device/virtual machine enables an administrator to shadow the user's desktop by transmitting a copy of the user's desktop display screen to the administrator's device.
In a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environment, thousands of virtual desktops may be running in a data center. Centrally provisioning, updating, patching, and securing these virtual desktops, and their corresponding software, through the VDI environment provides efficiencies in computer resource management. Running a separate software process on each of these virtual desktops to enable desktop shadowing, however, can consume a significant amount of resources.